Come Closer
by inbetweenbreaths
Summary: Post-S3. Wracked by guilt and on the verge of giving up, Piper Chapman is taken on a tour of the lives she's touched in order to learn a few crucial lessons. Canon compliant and inspired by the premise of "It's a Wonderful Life." (Angst. Warnings for depression and suicidal thoughts.)
1. Chapter 1

**Notes:** This is basically just the intro. Part 2 will be longer. This fic is a bit of an experiment for me stylistically and content-wise (I usually stick to AUs), so let me know what you think.

* * *

Nightmares always lead Piper to the greenhouse.

The yard is quiet as she walks, wrapping her up in a cemetery silence. She pushes the door in with her elbow like she's afraid to leave fingerprints. It creaks open—or it would, if the dream weren't so soundless. Footsteps on floorboards, her beating heart, the blood pounding in her ears—it all muffles into mute silence as she drifts over the threshold.

Alex is inside, lying motionless on the concrete. There is a constellation of bruises blooming like nebulae across her skin. Her forearms are studding with shards of glass that make Piper think of a broken champagne flute, a toast gone wrong, all those future hopes dashed to pieces.

Her eyes are closed—swollen shut. Can't see anything, certainly can't see Piper, but her fingers twitch like she knows someone's there. Her mouth opens to make the shape of a name but then closes, unable to loosen the stranglehold of that choking silence.

Alex's body looks irreparably broken.

Piper's heart echoes like an empty drum.

She bends forward and tries to touch, but her fingers scrabble on empty air. Can't get close enough to press against the bleeding wound on Alex shoulder, or even to brush away the disheveled hair that falls across her forehead.

Suddenly Piper is holding a shovel—garden-variety, heavy, oxidized iron. She knows what's been done with it; the evidence is all over Alex's body. All the blood and bruises scream in vibrant color, so loud they almost manage to make a sound.

When she drops the weapon there is no sense of relief, only the knowledge of something else filling her palm. Metal again, this time small and cold as frostbite in her fingers.

A silver pistol, chambers loaded.

 _'I sleep with a gun,'_ she remembers hearing Alex whisper.

She remembers dismissing Alex's fear, too; remembers mocking her, lying to her, turning away into the arms of—

—she can't even think about it.

But she understands about the gun now, because she sleeps with one too. Every night she turns it in her hands, unsure which direction to point the barrel.

Every night the same nightmare, until she feels like a ghost in the making.

::::::::::

.

Daylight brings more of the same. She pretends to be asleep until Red leaves the cube, and even then she stays in bed until a minute before breakfast, trying to make the solitude last as long as possible.

She sits alone in the cafeteria, spooning a few tasteless bites into her mouth only because her hands want movement.

A shadow falls across the table.

"Do you mind if I sit down?"

It's Yoga Jones. Piper glances at her and then down again quickly, not wanting to talk. She spends most of her time avoiding people these days, either wandering the yard (but keeping far from the greenhouse) or sitting in the back of the chapel with the lights off. Most of the time people leave her alone, but Jones is persistent.

"Have you heard anything about Vause?" she asks. Her characteristically quavery voice holds an extra layer of caution—it's the same tone wound-be rescuers use on wounded, feral animals.

Piper's stomach seizes instantly. The four spoonfuls of unidentifiable kitchen slop she previously forced down now churn uneasily in her gut. Anytime she hears that name, even the last name and even in her own head…

It's been nearly a month since the paramedics took Alex away. Piper never saw the greenhouse afterward, couldn't bring herself to even go near it, but some of the girls say there's still a stain on the concrete floor where it happened. The COs wouldn't tell them anything, but Piper worked it out pretty easily on her own: there was a guard who obviously wasn't a guard, but rather a hired hand of Kubra's, and he did exactly what Alex said he would do—

He tried to kill her.

He may have even succeeded.

Piper glances up at Jones— _only_ a glance, it's all the eye contact she can take—and shakes her head slowly.

Jones's eyes are soft. They hold an infinite, unwavering gentleness. When Piper first arrived at Litchfield, wearing her fears prominently on the sleeve of her orange uniform, Jones had looked at her with that same level compassion. ' _Try to look at your experience here as a mandala, Chapman,'_ she'd told her. 'And when you're done, pack it in and know that it was all temporary.'

She was wrong, though. Prison isn't a mandala; it's permanence. Whatever designs you make in here stay with you, sure as the words scarring Piper's forearm. A monk may make beauty out of sand, but a prisoner makes only this: a scar, a brand, a painful itch she'll never be rid of.

Her fingers move without thinking to touch the tattoo, tracing the jagged lines of lettering.

 _Trust no bitch._ Piper's three word biography.

If only it had been written in time to warn Alex away.

"She'll pull through," Jones says. Piper waits for more: some words of wisdom, some grand metaphor, but nothing else follows. It's just blind hope, totally useless to her.

"Last time," Piper says, her voice weak with disuse, "she sent me letters. I didn't answer them, but every week…"

She trails off, thinking of the envelopes addressed in Alex's hand and the little heart drawn beside her initials. It's enough to make her eyes water even though she hasn't cried in weeks.

"She's probably still recovering," Jones says, in what she probably thinks is a comforting tone. "I'm sure if she could contact you, she would. She cares about you."

Piper swallows hard. Even if that's true it only makes things worse, because either Alex has finally stopped caring enough to write to her, or Alex can't write because she's… _gone_.

Both possibilities hit hard as a gut punch.

Piper's chest burns like arson in an abandoned building, just rubble on fire in an empty room.

"I have to go," she says blankly.

She slips out of the cafeteria when CO Bayley's back is turned—not that he would try to stop her, given their previous interactions. She wants to write Alex a letter. She rushes back to her cube with more purpose than she's had in weeks. It's mercifully empty now that Red's back in the kitchen, and Piper is on her bunk in an instant, poised over a blank sheet of paper.

But as soon as she presses the pen to the page all of the urgency leaves her. Even if she knew how to do this, even if she knew what to say, there would still be nowhere to send it. She doesn't know where Alex is or if she's even _alive_. The only certainty is that she's gone, and no apology can fix it.

Piper never meant for any of this to happen, but that's the problem: she keeps making choices and hoping the fallout won't hurt her, and it hurts somebody else instead. Alex keeps taking the the collateral damage, and Piper doesn't know how to live with it.

She lays down with her head at the wrong end of the bed and listens to the way the sound mutes around her, the scene distilling itself down to the simplest of images and the sharpest of regrets.

Her tattoo itches, but she doesn't scratch. Her hands twitch like she's aching for something to fill her palms with. It should be Alex's hand, but she batted that away too often. Now all she has is the imaginary pistol gleaming between her fingers, barrel pointed uncertainly at the celling.

:::::::::

.

When she wakes again there's a figure sitting at the end of the bed.

Piper jolts and pulls her legs away, scooting her body backwards as she blinks in disbelief. It's not who it looks like; it _can't_ be.

Her hands are shaking badly as she flings the covers off and stumbles out of her bunk, still backing away. She stares wild-eyed at the woman sitting on the mattress, and _god_ , it is—

it's Alex.

"I thought you'd be happier to see me." The voice is right but the clothes are wrong; not prison khakis but jeans and a grey sweater. Piper recognizes them as the clothes she was wearing in the visitation room when she told Piper she was leaving town, and the reminder of that occasion compounds the panic.

"You're not real," she says breathlessly. "This is a dream. A nightmare. You're not real. _You're not real._ "

She repeats it as if doing so can make the whole scene dissipate, but it doesn't do anything except make Alex laugh a little.

"I show up in your prison cube in the middle of the night, and that's all you have to say?"

Piper's mouth opens, but no words come out. She can't believe how good Alex looks. Her eyes are winged with real eyeliner, not sharpie ink. She seems softer somehow, and younger, the way she looked before the grief and the drugs and the heartbreak. Before prison. Before _Piper_.

The thought makes Piper's lungs constrict. She's incapable of speech. She wants to throw herself into Alex's arms; she wants to fall to her knees and beg for forgiveness.

But this isn't Alex. Not the real one, anyway.

"Whatever," the apparition says with a shrug. She seizes Piper's jacket from its hook and tosses it at her. "Put that on—we've got places to be."

Piper hesitates only a moment before surrendering and thrusting her arms into the sleeves. If this is a dream, at least it starts with Alex alive and well instead of cold and dying on the the greenhouse floor.

She finds the courage to speak as they're exiting the dorm. "Where are we going?"

Alex regards her with a sidelong glance. "You'll see," she says vaguely.

Everything is quiet around them except for the buzz of fluorescent lights. The prison is empty; no bunks occupied, no COs in the corridors. The administrative offices are open and vacant.

They pass by the cafeteria and then out through the door to the yard, where dawn is lighting up a milky sky. Piper's boots squeak through the dewey grass; Alex doesn't seem to make a sound.

They stop abruptly at the gate to the track. It's closed, chained and secured with a forbiddingly large padlock.

Piper stares at it in confusion. "Why did you bring me here?"

"Because I wanted you to see that it's closed."

"So?" She's feeling impatient now. The dream is drawing out longer than she expected—there's no immediacy to it, no sense of impending horror like in her usually nightly visions.

"You're the one who fought to reopen it," Alex tells her. "Doesn't it bother you at all?"

"No," she says passively, because this whole discussion feels pointless.

Alex sighs. "You're not yourself any more, Piper."

It's the first time she's heard Alex say her first name in weeks. Even before the attack it was last names only—impersonal to the extreme, the way two people act when they're trying to sidestep each other. Or rather, Piper was sidestepping; Alex was confrontational as always, sincere and straightforward with both her concern and her disdain to the point where Piper just couldn't face it.

"I know you," Alex continues, "and I know what you're doing. You're burying yourself a little bit at a time. You _want_ the nightmares."

"Fuck you."

She didn't mean to say it. The words are pure instinct, her only viable retort, but they don't deter Alex at all.

"Look," she says, pointing at the track. "You fought for this. You did this for Janae. And if you stop believing that you're capable of kindness, if you just _give up_ , then all the good you've done just goes away."

"All the good that I've done?" Piper repeats. "All the _good_? I turned Blanca's phone in to Healy. I took away her happiness and gave it to someone else! That's not good, Alex. That's crap. Every time I try to do the right thing it turns out wrong anyway. I can't do it anymore. I'm done."

She can't remember the last time she felt angry instead of apathetic, but she's so hot now that she's sweating. Inside her pockets her hands are clenched into fists.

"You don't get to just quit," Alex informs her. "That's not how this works."

"What is 'this,' exactly?"

"An intervention. You obviously need some reminders."

"Of what? All the stupid, fucked up things I've done in my life? Don't you think that you _standing here_ is reminder enough?"

Piper doesn't mean it to sound so accusatory; she knows this is her fault. And, fuck, this isn't even the real Alex that she's talking to—it's just some manifestation of her subconscious, the last resistant part of herself that she hasn't managed to shut down yet. The real Alex is gone, and even if she's still alive she couldn't possibly want anything to do with Piper.

But the look in this imaginary Alex's eyes is pure determination. She tosses her head impatiently, dark hair falling back behind her shoulders.

"Come with me."

"No."

" _Come with me_ , Piper."

She says it softer the second time; a sad mimicry of the moment when she asked Piper to leave her life behind and leap into an unknown future. Piper had been happy to do it then, and she'd be happy to do it now. But that's not what _this_ Alex is asking.

"I still don't see the point," she says slowly.

"I know. That's why you have to do it."

Alex extends her hand toward Piper. The sleeves of her sweater are rolled up, baring the tattoo on her forearm. Piper's eyes linger on the pattern. She wishes hers was as innocuous.

"Give me your hand," Alex demands, and the low timbre of her voice is enough to make Piper obey.

Her chest fills with a bittersweet ache at the touch of their fingers. The warmth of Alex's palm is a reminder of something Piper is certain she's lost forever. Still, it can't hurt to pretend for one night that this is real; that Alex is alive and unharmed and still _wants_ her.

When the dream is over, all of that disappears. Might as well make the most of it while she still can.


	2. Chapter 2

"What's your favorite winter memory, Piper?"

The question seems random, but Alex is looking at her with such an anticipatory grin that Piper thinks maybe she's missing a joke.

Then a snowflake lands in her hair, and Alex's grin widens like she's just delivering the punchline.

Low clouds have coalesced into an endless expanse of grey, and flakes are drifting lazily downward. What had been ordinary autumn weather a moment before is rapidly becoming a winter cold front. Piper's cheeks tingle from the sudden drop in temperature, and her breath escapes in a cloud of vapor as the snow begins to fall in earnest: wet, heavy flakes, which at first melt upon contact but then begin to stick.

They collect in Alex's hair, a beautiful dusting of white on black; angelic somehow, almost like… _a halo_.

It's so beautiful that for a moment Piper forgets to breathe. Her face is cold but her hand is still caught up in Alex's grip, fingertips tingling with warmth as all of her blood rushes right to them. Snow keeps collecting in Alex's hair and a flush of warmth tinges her pale cheeks. It's a beautiful contrast of color, a lovely commingling of frigidity and heat.

 _"What's your favorite winter memory?"_

Images leap to mind of the January she went with Alex to Berlin; of sipping hot chocolate and nibbling pastries before slipping into the snow-covered streets, pausing to kiss on street corners as they walked unhurriedly back to their hotel.

But far from warming her, the rush of memories is a glacial and splintering ache. Piper thinks of all the wreckage that lies between _then_ and _now_ , and it feels like fingers of frost knifing their way into her chest, cracking her ribs into fragments.

She yanks her hand out of Alex's grip, knowing she has no right to hold onto good memories when she's the one tossing them onto the pyre. She thinks instead of all the times she had Alex only long enough to lose her—Paris, Litchfield, Chicago, Litchfield again—and wonders if maybe it hurts so much to remember what happiness felt like because she doesn't deserve to ever feel it again.

The corner of her lip twitches. She relaxes it; relaxes her brow and cheeks, too, systematically clearing any hint of her thoughts from her expression.

 _Her favorite winter memory?_

"I don't have one," she tells the Alex who is not really Alex.

The answer earns her a frustrated stare. The doppelgänger runs a hand through her hair, slicking away the snowflakes.

"You're getting really good at that," she tells Piper.

"At what?"

"Pretending you're immune to emotion. Putting on that blank fucking expression and acting like nothing can touch you. Jesus, it makes you look like a complete stranger."

Piper folds her arms across her chest. Defensiveness is one of her few remaining emotional defaults, but she masks it by blinking indifferently and saying nothing.

"How long are you going to do this?" Alex snaps, running her fingers frustratedly through her hair again. "Just once, Piper, I want to see you look at me like it's still _you_ in there."

The words should sting but they don't, and it surprises Piper a little how easily she's able to brush them aside. She gives Alex a brief, defiant look and then deliberately turns her head, eyes fixing passively on some vague point in the distance.

"Wow, that's really mature. You're making it seriously difficult for me to help you."

"Then _don't_ ," she spits, thrusting her hands back into her pockets and turning away. She takes a couple of steps, exhaling clouds into the cold.

It used to be harder to turn her back on Alex. She used to feel the tug of resistance in her own chest every time, like there was an invisible thread connecting their hearts that hurt if yanked too carelessly. But now Piper's pretty sure the thread has snapped altogether, and it's getting easier to turn away. She feels it less every time, and tells herself she prefers the numbness.

But before she's put even a yard of distance between them, Alex's voice stops her.

"Don't you want to know what my favorite winter memory is?"

Piper wants to say no, but curiosity makes her pivot.

When she turns around it's not Alex that grabs her attention but what's behind her: people appearing as if out of thin air, their faces blurry and indistinct. She identifies them at first by their uniforms—a pair of correctional officers and several pairs of inmates materializing in the snow, sharpening until their features finally come into focus.

The inmates are clearing walkways around the camp's main building. There are only enough plastic shovels for half the group, so they share, working in teams and switching off when one of them gets tired. The people have a transparent aspect and their movements are stuttered, like the entire scene is a home movie playing out of an old slide projector.

"Your favorite memory is prison?" she says scathingly, but Alex points to one of the pairs of inmates and Piper's eyes obediently follow.

She recognizes herself with a jolt of surprise, though the Piper in the memory is a year younger. Her hair is unmistakably shorter underneath the grey knit hat she's wearing, and she has the sleeves of her oversized jacket bunched up around the elbows.

She looks so effortlessly happy that the present-day Piper almost can't recognize herself. She's smiling for no apparent reason, an easy and freely offered grin. The only thing she has accomplished is moving slush across the pavement, but she looks so happy—so blissfully content. When she pauses to toss a load of snow aside her gaze slides automatically toward Alex, who is working as her shoveling partner. When they lock eyes Piper's smile visibly brightens.

She turns away and returns to the task at hand, methodically pushing the shovel forward and tipping it to the side, heavy snow sliding off with a thump. Repeating the motion, over and over, her back turned to Alex.

Suddenly a hand is sliding inside her jacket, cold fingers gripping her bare hip; she whirls around just in time to glimpse Alex's mischievous smirk before something icy and wet slides down the back of her shirt, taking her breath away.

She yelps and dances out of Alex's grasp, shrugging off her jacket and attempting to shake the snow loose from her shirt while muttering curses, tottering wildly in the snow. Alex laughs delightedly, and the ruckus immediately attracts the attention of everyone in the vicinity, including the officers.

 _'Chapman! Vause!'_ CO Donaldson's voice barks out across the yard. _'Back to work! Now, or I'll write you both a shot.'_

Alex stifles the rest of her laughter, chuckling silently behind her hand. Piper fixes her with a heated glare as she finally succeeds in getting rid of the snow. Her back is wet, shirt sticking to it in places as she yanks her jacket back on.

The prank was stupidly schoolgirlish, and there's a long moment where Piper is obviously trying to hold onto her righteous anger. Her brows are furrowed in determination, lips pursed, eyes narrowed. But she can't maintain it. Her face relaxes and the smile returns as she rolls her eyes, kicking a clump of snow playfully in Alex's direction.

 _'Chapman! What did I just say?'_

She and Alex share a silent grin before Piper bends down to pick up the shovel, and then the scene starts to fade at the margins. Figures disappear back into a blank canvas of snow until only Piper and Alex are left, sharing that private, happy glance.

Their images soften and fade too, until the yard is once again empty.

Piper stares at the space where her past self was standing. She almost steps toward it, half longing to chase down the remnants of the memory. She can't believe how happy she was, can't believe how effortless and natural it felt to be with Alex in those few weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas; how years of distance and simmering resentment fell away beneath the unavoidable onslaught of their closeness.

"That's all it takes to make a good memory, Piper," Alex says, and the words come out soft and hushed as the snow falling around them. "Just the two of us. You and me."

Piper takes a trembling breath. She doesn't have any snappy rejoinders this time, just a pair of hollow lungs and a need to breathe deeply.

"You said that was the best part of your time in prison," Alex continues. "When you thought someone else named you at their trial. But even when you found out that I named you, and that I'd been lying to you about it for weeks, you still forgave me. Why?"

"You know why." Piper wraps her arms around herself, shivering. "You _told_ me: because I'm afraid of being alone. Because I'm selfish."

"Yeah," Alex acknowledges, "but that's only part of it. I think you forgave me because you were at your happiest when you thought we had a second chance. And I'm pretty sure that letting go of hope for a happy ending actually hurt more than anything we've done to each other. Don't you get that? You hurt yourself more by pushing me away than you would by staying and trying to fix it. It's always been like that, Piper, but you still keep leaving."

It's an accusation of sorts, but the look in Alex's eyes is so mercifully tender that Piper can't even face it. She stares at the ground, swallowing hard. How can she explain that hurting herself feels like a justified treatment? It's like shock therapy, a course of immunization against her own bullshit.

"You know what I remember from last winter?" she says, looking up suddenly. "Christmas."

The memory starts to manifest itself the same way Alex's did. The sky darkens rapidly until it's black as night, and two slightly transparent figures materialize in the area just outside the doorway: Piper, looking wide-eyed, disheveled, and a little bit wild—and Doggett in her angel costume, holding the sharpened stake of the cross out in front of her.

 _'God loves me!'_ she shouts, her voice filled with fervent conviction. _'He don't love you, 'cause you ain't worthy of God's love. You ain't worthy of nobody's love.'_

Even now, watching from a distance, the words cut Piper to the core. The memory version grits her teeth and curls her fingers into fists, but the present-day Piper doesn't have the same fight left in her. She just takes a deep breath and waits for the final blow to fall.

 _'I think it's time… that you die.'_

Doggett lunges, but the figures immediately start to fade. Piper doesn't want to watch the fight that follows; doesn't want to see Doggett's blood dotting crimson onto the snow, or remember how her knuckles split open against the cheekbones. She closes her eyes until she's sure the memory is over, and then finds Alex's face in the dark.

"That's what I remember," she says tremulously. "That I hurt you, and _her_ , and everybody. That I'm not worthy of the happiness you keep talking about."

The tenderness is gone from Alex's eyes, replaced by a blazing impatience.

"Fine," she says, "then what about me? Don't I deserve a little happiness, after everything? I want _you_ , Pipes. I want you whole. I want you back. That's my happiness. Who gave you the right to decide whether or not I get it?"

"You're not even _Alex!_ " Piper bursts out, as the anger finally sweeps aside her efforts at indifference. "You keep talking like you're her, but you're not. You're just a stupid dream!"

She whirls around and starts to walk away, churning snow beneath her heels, but Alex overtakes her in an instant.

"This isn't a choose-your-own-adventure, Piper. You can't just go wherever you want to. You're stuck with me until I decide we're done."

"No, I'm not."

Piper sidesteps, striding past her to grab the handle of a door embedded in the side of the building. But when she tugs on it, nothing happens. She yanks harder, pulling with all her weight. Then she kicks hard at the unyielding metal, but all it does is bruise her toes through their boots.

"The only way to get rid of me is to see this through to the end," Alex says behind her, in a voice of maddening calm.

Piper presses her hands flat against the side the of the building, leaning forward while she tries to get her breathing back under control. She feels trapped and sick, the frustration stirring nauseously inside of her. When she opens her mouth to ask what happens next, she's spared the necessity of speech by the intervening beep of a car horn.

The prisoner transfer van is barreling toward them, leaving tire tracks in the snow. It comes to an abrupt stop just a few feet away. Piper peers through the windows at the driver in the front seat.

Of course, it's Doggett.

Piper's face blanches. "No," she protests immediately. "No way. I'm not getting in there."

But Alex is already sliding into the back seat. She looks from Piper to the passenger door with her eyebrows raised, and after a moment it becomes obvious that nothing further is going to happen unless Piper relents. She opens the door and slips into the passenger seat, refusing to so much as look at the driver.

"Seatbelt, Chapman," Doggett reminds her pleasantly.

She puts the van in drive and loops back onto the dirt road, the one that will take them away from camp.

"You know I ain't even supposed to being driving no more? On account of me having some kind of fit—one of them seizures. Limbs shakin', eyes rollin' back into my skull and everything. Almost drove me and Officer Coates right off the road. Lost my driving privileges like _that_." She snaps her fingers for emphasis, and the way she says it sounds almost gleeful.

Bragging about nearly committing vehicular homicide strikes Piper as borderline insanity, but then again she's no longer an authority on moral or mentally sound behavior. Besides, she's too busy fighting off the rising tide of nausea to say anything in response.

"You notice something odd about today? 'Cause it's like, really weird how there's no officers around. Nobody in this whole prison except you, me, and Vause. She handed me the keys and told me to warm the van up, and, I don't know why but I just _did it_ , 'cause there's something different about her. Something new, like she's glowing, or, I don't know. You notice that?"

Piper glances at the mirror on the sun visor; it's tilted at just the right angle to catch a reflection of Alex smirking in the backseat.

"I know you don't believe in angels, Chapman," Doggett says. "I reckon I don't really believe in them anymore either."

Piper thinks of her costume from the Christmas pageant, and her stomach flips uncomfortably.

"But if I did? I don't know… seems sorta silly, but like I said: she's different somehow."

The van is rolling steadily across the gravel. They're almost out of camp now, approaching the final gated checkpoint which is, like the rest of the facility, completely unmanned.

Piper clutches the armrest on the door until her knuckles turn white, hardly daring to breathe. Her stomach roils from a combination Doggett's driving and the fact that leaving camp feels like its own kind of sentence. Her last time out was when she got furlough, and it feels like an entire lifetime has elapsed since.

"Where are we going?" she asks, with the distinct and disturbing feeling that they're driving in the wrong direction. They should be taking Piper back to prison, not away from it. She's afraid of what freedom will feel like. She's afraid of what she'll do without the walls holding her in.

Doggett guns the engine and swerves onto the state road.

In the backseat Alex remains calm, surveying the landscape of barren trees through the window with a look of polite disinterest. She glances up to meet Piper's gaze in the mirror.

"We're going to your parents' place," she says. "Don't you want to see Carol and Bill on Christmas?"

* * *

 **Notes:** So I opted for a shorter update instead, with hopefully another one coming early next week. My goal is to finish this thing by Christmas. I'm deviating a little from the 'It's A Wonderful Life' premise, because really I just wanted to borrow the guardian angel/memory devices and use them to explore Piper's post-s3 headspace. Hope that wasn't too misleading.


	3. Chapter 3

Piper tightens her grip on the armrest.

Her throat closes up.

She _panics_.

She most certainly does not want to see Bill and Carol on Christmas, and she's even more certain that they don't want to see _her_. They haven't been face-to-face since that disastrous visit on Piper's birthday, when her father sat on the far side of the table with his eyes downcast.

For thirty straight minutes he studied his shoes, his hands, and his beige cinderblock surroundings, refusing absolutely to meet his daughter's gaze. Carol, meanwhile, made a valiant attempt at conversation while pointedly ignoring the conflict. Her approach was much more in keeping with the Chapman way: put on a smile and pretend that everything's fine until people start to believe it.

In some respects Piper is her mother's daughter: she learned to minimize the damage by painting over it, deluded herself into believing that if she can't see the problem then it simply doesn't exist. Carol didn't admit her husband was cheating on her so she wouldn't have to face the damage; Piper didn't acknowledge that Alex named her before a federal judge, so they could continue on as if that revelation changed nothing.

Deceit didn't feel wrong as long as it soothed the conflict—in fact, it felt a lot like mercy.

But Piper is her father's daughter too: she learned how to dodge responsibility by passing it off as someone else's failure. She blamed Alex's paranoia for wedging them apart. It was another kind of merciful lie, the type that soothes one person's feelings while protecting them from the hurt felt by the other. It's just how Piper learned to do things.

She can see her inheritance now for what it is: her parents are two sides of a coin stamped on fool's gold, which Piper keeps trying to buy a life with. It's a dishonest transaction and she knows that now, but she has nothing of her own left to barter.

Desperation takes hold of her. She turns to look at Doggett for the first time since getting into the van.

"Turn the car around," Piper tells her. "Take me back."

"Ignore her," Alex says from the backseat. "She's just being pissy because she has daddy issues she's too scared to deal with."

" _Fuck you_. Doggett, turn around."

"Alright look, I'm trying to drive and the road's real slick right now 'cause of all the snow, and the two of you arguing and yammering at me is not helpin' any." Doggett gives Piper a side-eyed glance. "I gotta be honest Chapman, I really don't get why you'd rather be in prison. Don't a few hours of freedom sound good to you?

Piper sinks back into her seat and pulls her arms toward herself, hugging them against her torso. She doesn't have the strength to keep arguing.

But Alex won't let it go.

"C'mon Pipes," she taunts, "I think you should explain it to her. Tell her why you want to go back. Tell her why you won't see your family on Christmas."

A lump is rising in Piper's throat. She tries to swallow it down but it just sits there, heavy and threatening, as Alex continues to berate her.

"Tell her why you took your friends off your visitation list. Why you've refused to see _anyone_ for the last couple of months."

She tries to breathe through her nose but still can't seem to get enough air. Her head aches and her chest feels tight, stretched like a balloon on the verge of bursting.

"Tell her why you're turning away everyone who cares about you," the voice from the backseat demands.

It's a good imitation of the real Alex when she's angry—it has that raw timbre, that hard edge, like her words are trying to grind stone into powder. But it's colder than Alex's voice would be in a conversation like this. It's missing that compassion she reserves only for Piper, which is audible even during the worst of their arguments. The absence of it makes Piper's skin break out in goosebumps.

 _"Say it,_ Piper."

"Because they're happier without me," she whispers, "Because I'll _hurt_ them,"

Presumably she means her parents, or maybe Polly and Larry, but after she says it she starts thinking about Alex; about the dreams and the greenhouse and the blood on the concrete. Her throat is still tight but the words finally shake free, spilling forth in a torrent of sorrow..

"I'm dangerous _,"_ she confesses. "I ruin things. I ruin _people_. Everyone in my life is embarrassed to know me."

She thinks of the way Alex started looking at her right before they broke up last time—the mixture of pity and disgust in her eyes, like she was staring at a distasteful stranger.

"I can picture everyone together for Christmas—my parents, Cal, Neri—all of them doing their best not to mention me. If someone says 'Piper' my dad probably drops his fork. I'm worse than a dirty word at the dinner table."

Her eyes sting like they're filling with tears, but when she rubs them with her knuckles she's relived to find them dry. Crying is a release she doesn't feel worthy of.

"Polly and Larry have each other now. Going to prison is the best thing I've ever done for them." She lets out a choked sob of laughter. "Remove me from the equation and it's happy endings all around. As long as I'm locked up…They're just better off without without me."

She doesn't say anything about the most egregious wrongdoing of them all—the way she ruined _Alex_ —because it feels too delicate and important to bury in a list of faults. She doesn't need to say it, because she can see Alex's eyes in the mirror and the look in them speaks volumes. It's morose and accusatory and achingly familiar, and Piper can't bare to look at it.

"Is that really what you think? That everyone's better off if you just _don't exist?_ Jesus, Piper, that's a fatalistic low even for you."

Piper looks resolutely out of the window, her gaze sliding over the passing trees and houses without really seeing them.

"Alright, fine. You really want to see what everyone's lives look like without you? Let's do it. Let's see if a world without Piper Chapman is as great as you think it would be."

Piper's eyes widen. When she focuses on the passing landmarks she realizes that they're now driving through the outskirts of her hometown.

It has that idyllic New England charm, with its little brick chapel and white picket fences. Snow blankets the rooftops of the houses,and swirls of smoke rise from a few old chimneys. It's the picturesque opposite of prison, but Piper feels no sense of homecoming.

"I think I know what's going on here," Doggett says. She's been silent through Piper and Alex's argument, watching the road and listening to what must have been a very confusing exchange. Now she has an expression on her face like the light bulb in her head has just turned on.

"This is like that Christmas movie, that uh, what's it called? That _movie_. Vause is a ghost, and now she's trying to teach you how to stop being such a humbug."

Piper whips her head around.

"She's not a ghost!" she hisses.

Because Alex can't be a ghost.

If she were she would be _dead_.

"Yes she _is_ ," Doggett says excitedly. "She's like, the ghost of Christmas future!"

Alex lifts an eyebrow. "Do evangelicals even believe in ghosts?"

"It don't matter! I ain't stupid, alright. I know what you are."

She doesn't sound scared, though. Impressed and maybe a little elated, but not _scared_ , which is more than can be said for Piper.

"Look, Doggett—just do us a favor and wait in the car, alright?"

"Yes m'am." Tiffany raises her hand and gives Alex a mock salute.

Piper opens the passenger door and jumps out before the van even rolls to a stop, sucking in lungfuls of fresh air to try and counteract the sick feeling in her stomach.

Her childhood home looms above her. She doesn't want to go in, but indulging this fake Alex's whims seems like the only way to get rid of her. She takes a moment to collect herself and then rings the bell, because it's the _polite_ thing to do.

Piper pictures her mother opening the door, slowly and with a look of surprise that quickly sours. There would be some biting comment about her daughter's perpetual tardiness, or perhaps an exaggerated up-and-down stare and raised brow in response to Piper's attire. But the door doesn't open.

The house remains dark and uninvited, and Piper doesn't want to go in.

"It's unlocked," Alex says, forcing the issue, so she has no choice but to push it open and step over the threshold.

The house seems bigger inside than Piper remembers it. It _feels_ bigger. Her mother's decorative tastes have always been stylishly simplistic, aiming for elegance rather than ostentation, but Piper's never noticed before how empty the house feels because of it. The distance between the front door and the living room archway is punctuated only by an umbrella stand and a useless accent table, so that yards of unused space stretch out beyond the misleadingly titled 'Welcome' mat.

As Piper steps into the living room the hugeness of it seems to press back against her, momentarily crushing her breath away.

It doesn't look like it did when she was a kid. There's a token Christmas tree on the buffet, one of those little plastic things that come prewired with a string of lights. When Piper was little they always got a real tree. The entire family would lace up boots and tug on mittens and trudge off to the tree farm, where she and Cal got to take yearly turns choosing. _"Which one, Piper?"_ her father would ask, and she'd traipse down the row looking this way and that, finally pointing to the one she wanted. _"That's perfect, pumpkin,"_ he'd tell her proudly, before turning back to the car to fetch the handsaw.

Bill once had a warm smile and a wink he reserved only for his daughter. Now he can't even bear to look at her.

There's a family portrait hanging above the tree. It looks like posed mall photography. Carol and Bill stand stiffly with their son between them, and Cal is wearing a collared shirt and a professorial little sweater vest, the kind of thing he always _hated_ wearing. Piper can't remember him ever dressing up like that without a loud and hard-fought struggle. In the photo he's standing front and center—the Chapman's only child.

Without thinking Piper lifts her hand and brushes the glass surface of the frame, fingers touching the spot where her picture should be.

"You don't exist, remember?" Alex says behind her.

She's sitting on the floral-printed sofa looking perfectly at ease, and something about the pose makes Piper's heart ache. Alex—the real Alex—has never been to the Chapman's house; not for holidays or family dinners or even a casual introduction.

Piper hid their relationship like a bad habit, a guilty pleasure: something to be enjoyed only when no one was watching. Back then the idea of Alex sitting in her mother's living seemed so ridiculous that it made Piper laugh. Now, though, it doesn't seem as funny. Because Alex looks so _nice_ , sitting there in her soft grey sweater—so clean and poised and perfect—that Piper can't remember why she ever acted so ashamed of her.

She lowers her hand and steps away from the portrait.

"Okay," she says, in a voice of determined calm. "I'm not in the family photo. Is that all you wanted me to see?"

"Look around. Doesn't it feel different?"

Of course it does, but there's no way to articulate the specific uncanniness of it; the strange way that a place can look the same yet feel so unfamiliar.

"It feels different to _me._ That doesn't mean anything has changed for the rest of them."

"Nothing's changed, huh?" Alex raises an eyebrow. "The house seems pretty empty for Christmas Eve. I wonder where everyone is."

The would-be-casual way she says it seems to imply something a little sinister. It makes Piper notice anew how quiet it is. The full weight of the silence bears down on her, reminding her of the dreams again: of Alex in the greenhouse mouthing words too hushed to hear, words that could be 'Piper' or 'help me' or 'just leave,' each as likely as the other.

She shivers. The air in the living room feels cold. Her mom probably dialed the thermostat down before she left.

"Okay," she says. "I'll play along: where are they?"

"In there."

Alex points toward a doorway out in the hall.

Piper frowns. "That's a coat closet."

"Oh ye of little imagination. Trust me, just open it."

Piper sighs. She's too tired to keep questioning what Alex seems determined to show her, so she follows directions and walks back into the hall.

The doorknob to the closet is cold against her palm. When she pulls it open, the scene around them changes.

The doorframe dissolves, and what's beyond it is no longer the old coats and musty darkness she expected to find—it's prison.

Not _her_ prison. A different one.

She's standing in a visitation room that's more cheerless than Litchfield's, if that's even possible. The walls are a blander shade of beige. There's no artwork made by visiting children, not even those phony anti-suicide posters to break up the monotony. It's just a blank, empty room, with mismatched tables and uncomfortable plastic chairs.

And clustered around one of those tables are the members of her family—Bill and Carol on one side, and Cal on the other wearing a prisoner's uniform.

It's all _wrong_. It should be Piper sitting there, with her khaki scrubs and her limp, unkempt hair, but instead it's Calvin. Her little brother, clad in an orange jumpsuit stamped 'D.O.C.' in blocky letters. His hair is buzzed short—he's never worn it that way before.

 _Her little brother._

His face looking disturbingly pale, his eyes dull with resignation. It doesn't even look like _him_.

"What happened?" Piper croaks out.

"He was arrested two years ago," Alex tells her. "A four year sentence. Longer than yours."

"For _what?"_

"Manufacturing and sale of marijuana. He was living on a cannabis farm in Idaho when the Feds busted it."

 _"Jesus!"_

It doesn't seem possible. Cal, in prison for _four years._ It sounds insane. Her brother was always a little reckless, always pushed the envelope a little, but he'd never done something so downright…criminal.

"I don't believe it," Piper says automatically. "Cal would never get involved in something like that, he'd never… well, okay," she reluctantly amends, "maybe he would. But Idaho? What the fuck was he doing out there?"

"Well, without you around to take some of your parents' scrutiny off his shoulders, the pressure was too much for him to handle. You know how your brother is—he hates tradition. He wants to do things his own way. But your parents? They wanted him to do things _their_ way—like you did. Or, would have _,_ had you been born."

Even though she knows this isn't real, the guilt cuts Piper deep. She's Cal's older sister. She's supposed to look out for him, and she wasn't there to do it.

"Your dad wanted him to go to business school," Alex continues, "but Cal wasn't having it. He told your parents he was going to college out west—forged an admission letter, financial documents, the whole nine yards. It was a constructed alibi. He figured he could appease your parents while secretly getting to live whatever life he wanted. Pretty brilliant, actually. Your brother's quite the mastermind."

Piper forces herself to look at Cal's face. It _hurts_. He has the saddest eyes now. The light in him that seemed so untouchable has all but burned out, and Piper feels like the one responsible.

But then she notices the way her parents are looking at him—or rather, _not_ looking at him.

Carol has her eyes on the clock, watching the seconds tick by like the passage of time is an act of mercy she's praying for. And Bill… Bill is looking at his shoes. At his hands. At his beige cinderblock surroundings. Anywhere but at his _son_.

Piper takes a deep breathe, letting her lungs fill up as the realization clicks into place.

When her father refuses to look at her, it's not Piper's mistakes he's ashamed to face—it's his _own_.

"The thing is, Piper," Alex says softly, "you've always been the strong one. It's not easy to placate your parents _and_ be yourself. You can beat yourself up for not being good enough, but it's not on you, and it's not on Cal—it's on Bill and Carol, for setting the bar too high."

It's the first time Piper doesn't have a rebuttal to Alex's logic, and fuck, it actually feels _good_ to have nothing to say. She's trembling a little, her chest rattling with every breath she takes, but she can feel something opening up inside her—the release of some pressure in her chest, excavating chambers of her heart that had long felt buried.

The scene begins to fade, her brother and her parents dissipating into mist.

She's back in the hallway of her parents' house, with her hand on the closet doorknob.

She rescinds it slowly and turns around.

"What if it's not enough?" she whispers. "What about everyone else? What about Polly, Larry…"

"Polly and Larry never became more than neighbors. Polly is a divorced single mother trying to make ends meet. _Without_ her best friend, I might add. Larry lives with his parents and works night shifts at Costco. You were the _one person_ who believed in his writing career, Piper. Without your support, he never published that first article. He never broke into journalism. He never got together with Polly, and neither of them are in a very good place."

Alex's expression is soft. Her eyes hold an infinite tenderness.

She lifts one hand and places her palm against the curve of Piper's cheek. Piper expects it to feel cold, the way it had been in the yard earlier when the heat dissipated from their clasped hands. But this time Alex's touch feels gentle and radiant and _warm,_ and Piper leans into it like she's striving toward sunlight.

"You have no idea how many lives you've helped along, Piper Chapman. I need you to know. I need you to believe me."

When takes her hand away Piper feels the loss of it like a sudden chill.

"There's one more thing I want to show you," Alex says.

This time Piper follows without hesitation.

When she walks through the front door she finds herself facing not the front lawn but a pair of cemetery gates.

The night air is cold against her cheeks—it cuts through her clothes, making her skin break out in goosebumps. Her breath comes out in puffs of vapor as she stares at the bars of wrought iron and the gargoyles that top the stone pillars, grim guardians in the midst of a winter storm.

She shakes her head. "I can't. _Please_. Don't ask me to do this."

"You need to. It's okay—I'll wait for you here."

Piper lets out a shuddering breath and forces herself to take a step forward. It takes effort to make her legs move, to make herself to go on despite a strong instinct not to. The gate creaks when she opens it, a metallic wail like a long cry of sorrow. She flinches at the sound.

There are no lights beyond the gate, but the snow brightens the night just enough to help Piper see where she's going. Not that she even knows what her destination is—her feet seem to make their own way, picking a path through the tombstones seemingly of their own volition.

She moves slowly, dreading what she'll find when her legs finally stop. Her walk is a long one, taking her to a gently sloped hill in the far corner of the cemetery.

She comes to a halt in front of a tombstone. When she sees the name engraved upon it, her heart nearly stops beating.

 _'Diane Vause,'_ it says.

It occurs to Piper then that she never bothered to ask Alex where her mother was buried. She doesn't know what was said at the funeral— _did Alex give a eulogy?_ —or how many people were present. She never asked how it felt to have to choose a casket (but how could anything be good enough for Diane?) _._

The tombstone is nice, as tombstones go. It's a large, dark slab of stone, and neatly engraved. It looks expensive. Alex still had money back then, and she must have spared no expense on the burial.

But Piper never _asked._ About this, or about what happened after she left. About any of the cracks that radiated outward from that one shattering moment and eventually broke Alex's life into shards, leaving her all deep cuts and sharp corners.

Piper never had to think about what Alex looked like standing over a lowered casket with a fistful of dirt clutched in her fingers. She got to walk away and not look back, and never asked about the place where half of Alex's heart was buried.

She feels leaden with delayed grief.

She sinks to the ground. It's more like a stumble, really—she pitches forward, bracing her hands to break her fall, and her palms press against something in the ground that's flat and smooth and cold.

It's another stone.

Piper brushes the snow away, and the silence of the night is so absolute that all she can hear is the soft whisper of snowflakes and the too-loud beat of her heart.

If the sight of Diane's tombstone stole her breath, the name on this one damn near breaks her.

The grave belongs to Alex.

When Piper reads the name, her lips move soundlessly to shape the syllables.

And then, _finally_ , she cries.

* * *

One chapter left to go! Thanks so much for reading.


	4. Chapter 4

Piper has been stoically _not crying_ for so long that she can't remember the correct way to fall apart.

It starts with a pounding in her chest, less like a heartbeat and more like fists beating, a chorus of metallic echoes that rattle the bars of her ribcage. It's percussive and loud and desperate, like something inside of her is trying to escape.

Her knees ache as she leans against them, pressing all her weight upon the gravestone. She reads the engraving again, traces her numb fingers over the grooves of text and the dates that bracket Alex's life like a pair of closed parentheses. They're a little too neat, a little too final _,_ and Piper's mind finally catches hold of the thought she doesn't want to face—

—how it feels to live in a world without Alex.

She simply can't bear it.

Tears drip everywhere—off the end of her nose and into the snow, down her cheeks and into her open mouth, only to be swallowed up by the gaping wide ache of her grief. The inelegance of it is freeing, somehow. She's so tired of keeping her composure that the act of emptying herself out evokes both anguish and catharsis.

She's bent over the flat gravestone like she's praying, even though she doesn't believe in prayer or God or anything really except the miraculous light of Alex's smile.

She's thinking of the greenhouse again, of the immutable silence that blankets Alex's limp body in her nightmares—how if she hadn't turned her back when Alex needed her, she wouldn't be sitting in a cemetery hoping this grave isn't actually real.

She's supposed to forgive herself. That's what the imaginary Alex—the guide, the angel, whatever she is—keeps telling her. But how can Piper accept such absolution when a world without Alex would be her fault?

The caged thing in her chest rips free with a mournful howl, blistering her heart so fiercely she can feel the scorch marks. She covers her face with her hands, needing somewhere to hide.

She cries for a long time.

When her chest finally stops heaving, when the last echo of a sob is swallowed up by the night, she sits back on her heels and rubs her stinging eyes.

There are footsteps crunching down the path behind her, but Piper doesn't turn around.

A million questions form in her mind but he only one she manages to croak out is, "how?"

"A bullet," Alex's voice answers. "It was always going to happen. Doesn't really matter if it's an apartment in Queens or a prison greenhouse. Killers always do what they're paid for."

Piper closes her eyes for a moment, swallowing hard. When she opens them again she notices that the landscape around her is as still as a settled snow globe, glittering white. Every surface looks new and clean. The world is a blank page, and Piper wants to be one too. She wants to unwrite herself, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, take it all back and start the story over.

"Here's the thing," Alex tells her, "there was plenty of tragedy in my life without you. My mom still died while I was in Paris. You weren't there to complicate things, I guess, but neither was anyone else. I was really fucking lonely."

It's not the first time Alex has spoken of loneliness, but for Piper it's the first time it really sinks in when she hears it. In her memory Alex was magnetic. If her gaze settled on you, it was impossible not to stare back at her. She had a way of making you feel lucky just to win her attention. _Charismatic_ was too weak a word to encapsulate Alex. Her voice was a caress, her laughter an exclusive invitation, and language offered no sufficient description for how she made Piper feel. It's difficult to picture someone like _that_ being lonely; difficult to imagine that she couldn't replace a girl as unworthy as Piper in a heartbeat.

But then again, maybe it's always been easier for Piper to imagine a tidy ending than to make herself confront the wreckage.

Alex kneels down across from her, knees lining up with the edge of the grave marker so that it's framed between their bodies. Piper's hands are still splayed agains the stone, but Alex reaches down and pries them off of it.

"You're the only person I've ever fully trusted," she says, wrapping her fingers around Piper's. "You know that, right? I mean, other than my mom."

Piper tries to pull her hands away, but Alex's grip remains steady.

"Without you I didn't have anyone, and I still had to bury her. It all happened the same way: the pills, the heroin, all of it. I self-destructed pretty easily, even without you leaving."

Piper thinks about the way she's been acting for the past month—going through the motions, floating ghostlike through the corridors and avoiding everyone's company. Losing the person she loves has her completely unhinged, and she wonders if this is what it was like for Alex after Paris: a half-trance, half-stumble kind of existence.

Self-destructing is apparently what both of them do best.

"So even if we never met… nothing would've changed?"

"Well, something did." Alex nods needlessly toward the gravestone on the ground between them. "Without you tipping him off, my parole officer never came to the apartment. He never caught me with that gun. I was holding it when Aydin came to the door, but he has a quicker trigger finger than I do, so…" she trails off, shrugging.

Piper shakes her head. "I thought—"

"—that I'd be better off without you?"

She sucks in a breath. "Yes."

"But how could you think that," Alex asks earnestly, "when you're the one thing that keeps my world from crumbling? I've always been happiest when I'm with you, Piper."

She pulls Piper's hands forward and kisses the knuckles one by one. The touch of her lips is feather-light, and the underserved tenderness of the gesture makes Piper tremble.

"You think it would be better if you didn't exist? I've thought that too. For eight years I tried to erase you. I tried burying you in my mom's grave, right next to the casket. Poured dirt over the memories. But your ghost was everywhere. You fucking _haunted_ me."

Alex laughs after she says it, which makes no sense because it's not a joke, it's a nightmare. It's her version of Piper's greenhouse dreams, regrets spinning themselves into a fog of guilt that clouds up everything.

"That's not funny," Piper says, in a pained whisper. "Alex, I never—"

"No," she interrupts, "you don't understand. I always thought it would be _her_. When I tied the tourniquet on, when I readied the needle, I thought I'd glance up and see my mom looking down in disappointment. But it was always _you,_ Piper. It was you in the bathroom mirror, staring at me the way you did before you left, like you couldn't choose between disgust and pity."

Piper's throat feels like it's closing up. She tries to whisper something, but all that comes out is a shuddering breath.

"I kept on using because I didn't want you to leave," Alex confesses. "I was shooting up to find your face in the margins of the hotel room, drinking to look for you at the bottom of the glass. I hated you and I loved you and I was trying to find you everywhere."

Piper flinches. There's an emptiness in her chest that swells up at the words _'I hated you.'_ She wants to scratch at her tattoo, to make herself _feel it_ , but Alex is still holding her hands fast.

"I'm not trying to make you feel guilty, okay? I just want you to know that there is no _me_ without you. I need you to stop wishing yourself out of existence, and start finding your way back to me."

Piper's heart inflates so rapidly she's afraid it might burst. Blood thrums through her veins like an orchestra playing to Alex's baton, every nerve and synapse awakening. She wants to obey that impulse, she really does, but she still isn't sure how to do it.

"I can't," she tells her, still tasting tears on her tongue. "I _can't_. Not without knowing."

"Knowing what?"

Piper's voice is a tremulous whisper. "If you're alive. If _Alex_ is alive. If she's ever coming back."

Because there's no avoiding the fact that even though the woman in front of her looks and sounds and _feels_ like Alex, she isn't. This is still a dream, and when Piper wakes up she'll be mired again in her own hostile aloneness.

"I can't tell you that," the look-alike says. "But if she comes back, what will you say to her?"

Piper doesn't know, because even after everything she's seen tonight, even with the assurance that Alex still loves her, she can't help but wonder if _love_ will ever be enough to fix the fundamental issue. No matter how many times they get back together, Piper always finds a way to mess it up. It's one of her few natural talents—creating new ways to ruin Alex's life without even meaning to.

She gets to her feet, and although her pants are stuck all over with snow she doesn't dust them clean. She wants to wear the cold like a form of penance. "I don't know," she says. "I can't stop feeling like _I'm_ the problem."

"But that's what I've been trying to show you. There's plenty of blame to go around, Piper. Your parents—"

" _Stop_. Just stop, okay? I learned all the wrong things, I get it. So what? I can't seem to _unlearn_ them. What if this is just how I am, and it's too late to change it?"

Piper's forearm tingles. She rolls up her sleeve, sees the words staring back at her: _trust no bitch._ It feels as relevant as ever, because the simple fact underlying everything is that good intentions don't make a damn bit of difference. They never have.

She _always_ hurts Alex, no matter how hard she tries not to. She's a wrecking ball with a broken control panel, and she's tired of her own reckless swinging.

"I want to go back now,'' she says flatly. "Just take me back. I don't want to see anything else."

Her guide doesn't say anything but she must be in agreement, because a moment later the cemetery starts to fade out. It disappears like all the other scenes they've watched together—one second the tombstones are standing like silent sentinels, and the next they've dissolving into the empty white landscape.

The prison van is waiting.

This time Piper slides into the passenger seat with a meek acquiescence. Her eyes are stinging and her fingers are numb. All she wants is to crawl back into bed and get on with another tomorrow, sit in the back of the chapel with the lights off and the hours ticking by uninterrupted.

"Where to?" Tiffany asks, glancing at Alex's face in the mirror.

"Back to camp."

"Aye, aye, captain."

They're back on the road, snow-covered trees whizzing by. Unlike earlier when the speed of the van made Piper feel sick, now the sense of motion is a comfort.

After a moment she becomes aware of Doggett sneaking glances at her. Her eyes keep sliding over to give Piper a curious, sidelong look.

"What?" Piper asks wearily.

"Nothin'. I just wanted to say sorry."

"Huh?" Whatever Piper was expecting, it certainly wasn't that.

"Yeah. For giving you such a hard time when you first got Litchfield. Trying to turn you into a Christian, and all that."

She waits for the tone of mockery in Doggett's words, but it never comes. She remembers the venom in Pennsatucky's voice that night out in the yard, the way she spat _you ain't worthy of nobody's love_ like a gleeful judge passing a death sentence. Remembering the words again makes Piper's skin crawl.

She just wants to forget about it, but Doggett doesn't let the conversation drop.

"It's just that I've been thinking lately about how you can't change somebody if they don't want to be changed, and how I shouldn't have tried to do it. 'Cause you are the way you are, Chapman. It ain't my place to try and turn you different."

Except that Piper _does_ want to be different. If it were possible for someone else to make it happen, she'd take that deal in a heartbeat. It's just that no amount of prayer or heavenly grace can work that kind of miracle.

"Oh, and also," Doggett continues, "I shouldn't have said all that stuff about you being a homosexual. Even if it's true." She squints up at the mirror. "Sorry, Vause."

Alex shrugs, looking amused. "Water under the bridge, Doggett."

"I think maybe you were right," Piper says cautiously. "Maybe I do need… forgiveness. Just not the kind you you were talking about."

Because she doesn't need it from God—she needs it from _Alex_. If Alex isn't alive somewhere and willing to forgive her, she might not be able to live with herself.

"Do you still think it's possible for people to change?"

"Well _yeah_ ," Doggett answers. "I don't know if you noticed this, on account of you seem really wrapped up in your own head, but I've been acting pretty different lately. Cause I've got people helping me now, and they got me seeing good in myself where I didn't think there was any before. And I'm telling you Chapman, it's a real nice feeling."

Piper closes her eyes, turning Doggett's words around in her head.

No one says anything else for the rest of the drive. Tiffany turns the radio on, humming along to some inane country song that Piper wouldn't mind never hearing again, even though she appreciates the white noise it creates.

When they turn off the state road onto Litchfield's property, she feels a sense of ragged relief. They're about to pass through the gates of the maximum security facility at the foot of the hill, when Alex suddenly leans forward.

"Stop here," she tells Doggett.

"What?" Piper turns around to look at her. "But this is max."

But Alex is already sliding the van door open, hopping out into the snow-covered gravel below.

Piper fumbles for the door handle, suddenly panicked. "Alex, this is max! You're supposed to take me back to _camp!"_

She's walking toward the entrance already, and Piper is torn between chasing after her and running in the opposite direction.

She can't go to max.

 _Stella's_ in there.

Alex pauses, waiting for Piper to catch up. "Relax, kid. We're not here for a consultation with your favorite tattoo artist, if that's what you're worried about."

The comment doesn't reassure her much, but Piper has no choice except to follow Alex inside.

Piper's only experience with maximum security was during Kubra's trial in Chicago. The Litchfield prison's only resemblance to that place is the dusting of dirt that covers everything, decades of accumulated filth layered on from crowding too many human bodies into too small a space. While the inmates in minimum are tasked with keeping their cubes spotless, there's a grime on the walls and floor of the cells here that looks impossible to remove.

The hallways are narrow and dark, and most of the floors are bare concrete. The cells themselves are small and crowded with bunks, and many of them are windowless. It reminds Piper of her holding cell in the SHU. It's easy to imagine how the absence of natural light could make a woman in here go crazy just trying to keep track of the time.

Guilt roils in her Piper's. She _sent_ a woman down here. A woman who tried to fuck her over, sure, but no one deserves to live like this.

She mentally adds it to the list of her misdeeds, which is now growing so long she can barely keep track of them all.

The prison is just as empty as th facility up the hill was earlier; no guards walking the corridors, no inmates in their cells. Except that as they progress down the hallway, Piper can hear the faint sound of somebody whistling.

Alex stops.

"Down there," she says, pointing toward the end of the hall. "Last cell on the left. Go ahead."

The whistling gets louder as Piper approaches. It's a familiar tune, but so badly off-key that she cant quite recognize it. The sound of that lone voice echoes eerily through the empty corridor, making Piper shiver. She's afraid of revealing her own presence until she knows who that voice belongs to so she walks softly, trying to be as soundless as possible.

When she reaches the end of the hall she approaches the cell with 's a woman lying on the top bunk with her feet propped against the wall, and—Piper notes with relief—and a large quantity of wild and bushy hair framing her face like a lion's mane.

"Nicky!"

The cell's only occupant stops whistling and sits up, glancing sharply at the source of the voice. Her face breaks into an easy, lopsided grin.

"Jesus fuck, Chapman," she says with a snort. "You look awful. Worse than me, and I live in this shithole."

Piper smiles, the first real grin she can remember in a long while, because _there's_ that Nichols charm they've been missing these last few months.

"You gonna come in, or are you just gonna stand there?"

Piper tries the door and finds, to her surprise, that it's completely unlocked. Nicky springs off the top bunk as she enters.

"You don't call, you don't write, and then you show up at my apartment uninvited? Frankly, Chapman, I'm a little insulted."

She daps Piper playfully on the shoulder, and Piper feels so relieved to see her that the grin on her face keeps lingering.

"I missed you, Nicky."

"Yeah, well, of course you did. It must be dull as shit without me."

"I wish I could say that were true."

Nicky sits down on the bottom bunk, gesturing for Piper to do the same. "Yeah, I heard you went all Al Capone on everyone. The new Vee in town, huh? Never would have thought you had it in you."

Piper's smile disappears. She drops her eyes and studies the threadbare spots on the blanket.

"Really?" she says, with an attempt at lightness, "because it didn't seem to surprise anyone else."

She thinks of what Alex said earlier this evening: ' _I want to see you look at me like it's still_ you _in there.' T_ he strange thing is that Piper's never felt _more_ like herself than she has these last few months. She finally stopped trying to be what everyone wanted—the nice blonde lady, poised and polished and endlessly contrite. Having dispensed with all that expectation, she was free to give into the baser instincts that were just as much a part of her makeup: selfish, dispassionate manipulation.

Because isn't everyone always telling her that _that's_ who she really is?

 _'You're a mean person.'_

 _'You're a selfish little person.'_

 _'You are such a manipulative cunt.'_

If that's what everything thinks of her then it must all be true, and her behavior shouldn't have shocked anybody.

"There you go with that self-pity again," Nicky says, rolling her eyes. "Not everyone is thinking about _you_ all the time, Chapman. Tell me something: how's Morello?"

"She's, um…" Piper hesitates, wondering if it would be better to spare Nicky's feelings by glossing over the truth, but then she catches herself. No matter how well-intentioned, the white lies just keep getting her into trouble. "She got married," she says, glancing up at Nicky uncertainty.

But Nicky just shakes her head, flopping her disheveled curls around. "Yeah, I know. Already heard that from one of the the transferred inmates a few weeks back. I mean how is she _doing_?"

"I don't know. Not good, I guess."

Nicky sighs. "I knew she'd go off the rails without me. That girl is utterly batshit, you know that? But fuck if I can't stop thinking about her."

"Why?" Piper asks abruptly.

"Why what?"

"Why do you keep thinking about her? If she keeps making these bad decisions, if she's so messed up, why don't you just… let it go?"

Nicky doesn't answer at first. She stares at Piper appraisingly, studying her expression. "I get it," she says finally. "This is about _you_ again. You and Vause, huh?" She presses her tongue against the inside of her cheek, as if she's contemplating how to answer.

"I'm sorry," Piper says quickly. "I didn't—"

"Listen, Chapman. It's a lonely world. At the end of the day, we're pretty much all out for ourselves in here. You think Lorna would have gotten married if Red was paying even a little bit of attention to her? Or Jones, or Gina, or anyone? No. But they weren't, because they're all too far up their own goddamn asses to notice what's going on with anyone else."

Piper leans forward with her elbows braced against her knees, burying her face in her hands. What Nicky just described—that's _Piper_. Too absorbed in her own problems to pay attention to the danger that Alex was in. And yet Alex kept caring for _her_. Even after she broke things off she still came by Piper's cube to check if she was okay, and Piper couldn't bring herself to return the courtesy. Instead she shrugged Alex off her back like she was some kind of burden, leaving her to face Aydin alone.

"If you find that one person who actually gives a damn about you," Nicky continues, "who pays attention even when they're knee-deep in their own shit—that's the person you want to stick with."

When Piper speaks again her voice is muffled. "Are you going to forgive her?"

"Lorna? Probably. She's not the first person to screw up, you know? I've done my fair share of stupid stuff. Getting sent down _here_ , for one thing.."

"What if… what if the stuff I've done is just too bad to be forgiven?"

Nicky sighs. "We've all done bad things, alright? And if you're waiting for a day when the whole world tells you you're a good person, you'd better not hold your breath. Just forget about everyone else and focus on making it right with that _one_ person. If that's Vause, then you gotta go to her and you gotta fix your shit. Do everything you can to keep her. Otherwise you'll end up like me, wondering if you completely lost your chance. And trust me, you don't want to know what that feels like."

Piper lifts her head out of her lap, heart pounding.

"You just have to decide who you want to be. Fight for it, Chapman. Fight for _her_ , and don't let anybody stop you."

Piper stands up, because suddenly if feels like there's no time left to waste. "I think I have to go," she says, and without waiting for an answer she heads toward the door.

"Hey—tell her hi from me, will ya?"

"I will," she calls over her shoulder. Then she's gone, leaving Nicky to fade away like the rest of the visions.

She passes back through the gate of the cell and out into the corridor, and then she's sprinting, boots pounding against the concrete floor. Her ears are filled with the sound of her own rushing blood. Her fists are clenched and her lungs fill like bellows, fanning the flame of determination that's sparked up inside of her.

The cell block starts to fall apart like a house of cards. Plaster and concrete crumble down around her as she sprints through the hallway. The exit is just ahead. She bursts through just in time to hear the building fall behind her in a thunderous collapse, everything fading into nothingness.

.

::::::::::::

.

Piper wakes with a gasp.

The light filtering in through the windows of the dorms is warm and golden.

Officer Bell's voice is on the intercom, giving the morning announcements.

 _" 'Go confidently in the direction of dreams. Live the life you've imagined.' Henry David Thoreau. He spent a night in jail once, so you may find his perspective relatable."_

Piper blinks, trying to clear the sleep from her eyes. She rubs at her face with the heels of her palms.

It's the first time in weeks that she's woken without thinking of blood on the greenhouse floor. Instead her mind is filled with the memory of snow: fresh, clean, and transformative.

She thinks about the blank page, and how badly she wants it. Her life has been written in permanent marker, she knows that—there's no starting the story over. But she's not out of options. She can keep writing it anyway, hoping the ugliest chapters become part of something ultimately beautiful.

With that thought in her mind she reaches for the piece of paper on her bedside table, the one she was going to use to write Alex a letter.

Without even rising to put on her clothes, she presses a pencil tip to the page and begins.

 _'Dear Alex,'_ she writes. _'Wherever you are, please know that I love you. I love you and I'm so, so sorry.'_

And it feels good.

* * *

 ** _Notes:_** Sorry it took so long for me to get this posted. I know the ending is a little half-assed, but I was really struggling to finish this one. I've never written a story with so little action and such intensive dialogue, so it was quite a challenge for me to pull off. Hopefully the end result conveys what I wanted it to.

There will be a brief epilogue to the story, to be posted within a day or two.

Thank you to everyone who's left a comment here or sent me a kind message on tumblr. :)


	5. Chapter 5

Your heart is like my hands: some days all they do is tremble.

I am like you. I too at times am filled with such fear—

but like a hallway, must find the strength to walk through it.

So walk through this with me.

Walk through this with me.

 **\- from "Come Closer," by Anis Mojgani**

* * *

Piper dreams of snow and forgiveness, of Alex alive and still loving her, and just like that the nightmares are gone. No more shattered glass or spattered blood, no more standing helpless while Alex lies dying in front of her. Instead Piper starts sleeping through the night, dreaming of nothing and waking up a little stronger.

Still, it's not enough. She's made a mess of herself these past few months, scattering hopes and fears like a trail of breadcrumbs through own psyche. They're a map back to the version of herself she misses most—the Piper that Alex fell in love with—but her mind is a dark, crooked hallway and she's walking through it blind. All she can do is feel her way forward, arms outstretched, treading softly on the floorboards of her own architecture.

On the second morning after the dream she reports to her work assignment as usual. The other girls in the Whispers sweatshop stopped talking to her weeks ago, which suits Piper just fine. She doesn't want to discuss the abandoned panty-smuggling enterprise. She doesn't want to feel anyone's anger, or worse—anyone's pity.

What she _does_ want is to steal a swatch of fabric—the good quality, skin tone, stretchy kind—and make herself an armband. If nothing else the panty scheme has turned her into a quick seamstress, and she has the contraband cut and sewn before the guard on duty can notice.

Later, in the bathroom, Piper yanks the band up her forearm. It covers the bottom half of her tattoo, mercifully hiding the worst of the white ink.

When she looks in the mirror all that's visible is the word _trust._

She wants to.

Because it's so hard to find her way _back_ , to know which thoughts are truly her own and which are just the internalized echoes of someone else's criticism. There are foundations somewhere at the core of her being; there are walls and pillars and doors that swing open, but she's so deep in her own darkness that she can't make out the shape of them. All she knows of herself are the words that resonate in the empty spaces—

 _'You're a bad person.'_

 _'You're a manipulative little person.'_

 _'You ain't worthy of nobody's love.'_

—and Piper feels made of those sound waves.

But she also knows they are not her is more than the sum of her worst moments. She is better than her bad deeds and stronger than the stones that have been thrown at her, even if she can't always see it for herself.

So she turns to the one person who has always known her for _exactly_ who she is, and just like in the dream, she lets Alex guide her.

Piper gets up in the morning because Alex would want her to. She takes refuge in her favorite books because her love of literature is something Alex always liked about her. She starts speaking again in case somehow Alex can hear her, and she meditates constantly on what the angel said in her dream: _I want you, Pipes. I want you whole._

For better or worse, making Alex happy is now Piper's sole imperative. She tries to knit the pieces of herself back together, not because it feels good but because it's what Alex would want for her— _from_ her.

Piper takes Alex's hand in the dark hallway of her subconscious, and somewhere a door opens to let in a thin seam of light.

 _Trust,_ the tattoo on her forearm demands.

Piper surrenders it freely.

::::::::

.

It's early afternoon on the day of one of Red's famous family-style dinners.

She and Piper haven't been speaking. There isn't much they can say to each other without reopening recent wounds. Red knows all about Stella and the panty business and the tattoo, and has made her opinions quite clear. Piper would rather not discuss them. They opt for detente instead, rarely interacting unless they have to.

Piper is therefore reasonably surprised when an invitation lands on the bed beside her—an entrance ticket for that evening's dinner.

She glances up, puzzled.

"It's by lottery," Red says gruffly. "Luck of the draw. Besides—" she looks Piper up and down "—you don't eat these days. You could use the calories."

Piper carries the invitation around with her, debating whether or not to accept it. She's wary of crowds still, wary of laughter and camaraderie because she doesn't think she deserves them.

But it's not her call—it's Alex's. And Alex would want Piper to go because it will be good for her, so she does.

The food is _real_ food, vegetables that crunch and bread that's still soft from the oven. Piper sits between Sister Ingalls, whose easy presence keeps her calm, and Taystee, whose humor manages to make her crack a smile once or twice.

Boo, her temperament softened by the hooch Poussey provided, clinks cups with Piper halfway through the meal. "Welcome back to the land of the living, Chapman," she toasts, and Piper murmurs a quiet thank you.

It feels surreal, to be sitting among all of these easy-going people and celebrating the simple fact of a good meal, when a week ago Piper could barely get herself out of bed. The food and the hooch have a soporific effect on her, and by the final course she's feeling pleasantly drowsy.

That is, until Jones suddenly appears at her shoulder wearing an expression of uncommon urgency.

"Chapman, you better come with me."

"Why?"

"It's _Vause_."

Piper isn't aware of anything she does after that. She doesn't stop to register whether the look on Jone's face indicates good news or bad, just scrambles out of her seat and flees the room. Jones points toward the chow hall and Piper takes off like a rocket, completely ignoring the CO who threatens to give her a shot for running.

She bursts through the double doors, scanning the room—and there she is. There's _Alex_ , standing at the end of the food line, bruised and sewn-up but perfectly _alive_.

Piper steps toward her tentatively. After all this time, she feels afraid. Her eyes are wide with wonder, both seeing the injuries and _not_ seeing them, too overwhelmed by the simple fact of Alex's presence to register how different she looks.

She breaths out Alex's name.

"Hey…" Alex says, uncertainly.

There's a moment where their eyes meet, a silent asking—and then they're reaching for each other, open arms and frantic fingers.

They kiss right there in the cafeteria, and somewhere inside of Piper the door at the end of the hallway is flung open. Light bursts through, warm as sunshine and blindingly brilliant, turning all the dust motes to glitter. The fear disappears beneath the steady pressure of Alex's fingers, the rhythm of the pulse beating beneath her skin.

And the long walk is over. Piper Chapman has come home.

* * *

 **Notes:** So that's it. Thanks for reading! I neglecting to mention at the start of the fic that the name was taken from an Anis Mojgani poem, so I included it as an epigraph since the imagery was relevant. Highly, highly recommend that you listen to the piece. Just search "anis mojgani, a strange brand of happy" on youtube and it'll come up.

Please do let me know what you thought of the fic, either by leaving me a review, sending me a message, or getting at me on elsewhere such as tumblr. Much love to you all for reading.


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